How to create and use a multi-select list in APEX ORACLE?

Question

I have a table called Employees with Employee_id and Employee_Name columns. Now i want to create a page with Checkbox in-front of every Employee Name, select the ones that are needed, store them into a temporary table and use them for further operations. The problem i am facing is to how to create that multi select list and store the select values in thee table. Is there an Item for multi select? If not, how should i do it?

Answer 1

There's the Shuttle item. On the left side, you'd display list of all employees. Item buttons allow you to move all (or only some of them) to the right side of the item. Once you submit the page, list of employee IDs is stored into a table column in a form of colon-separated values, for example

6547:8879:5587:9987

This is a simple way of doing that. However, once you have to actually do something with those values, you have to split them to rows. Not a problem, though. Here's a query:

SQL> with emps (shuttle_item) as
  2    (select '6547:8879:5587:9987' from dual)
  3  select regexp_substr(shuttle_item, '[^:]+', 1, level) one_item
  4  from emps
  5  connect by level <= regexp_count(shuttle_item, ':') + 1;

ONE_ITEM
---------------------------------------------------------------------
6547
8879
5587
9987

SQL>

Or, you could create a tabular form which also displays all employees and has checkboxes at the beginning of every line. You'd then create a process which - in a loop - stores selected values into a temporary table you mentioned. For example:

-- F01 = row selector. If you check 1st and 3rd row, f01.count = 2 (2 rows checked)
--       f01(1) = 1 (row #1), f01(2) = 3 (row #3)
-- F02 = EMP_ID. f02(1) = EMP_ID that belongs to employee in 1st row, 
--       f02(3) = EMP_ID that belongs to emplyee in 3rd row
declare
  l_id number;
begin
  for j in 1 .. apex_application.g_f01.count
  loop
    l_id := apex_application.g_f02(apex_application.g_f01(j));

    insert into temp_table (emp_id) values (l_id);
  end loop;
end;